Paul:

I'v had your post sitting in my mailbox for several days, with no time to
reply until now.

I know that the Seattle Art Museum just acquired a work by Lynn Hershman,
and there must be others, but I think your question is ahead of its time.
Museums have not really taken notice of digital art yet, and for the most
part it has been the computer and electronics conferences (Ars Electronica,
SIGGRAPH), that have supported the work.

When the museums and mainstream art galleries do catch on, the questions
you ask will become major issues.  A piece by Hershman in a recent show we
did required an old Mac Plus, which we were unable to find and ended up
using one of hers.  Bill Seaman gave us only software for the show, and we
provided all of the hardware.  Others were a combination of artist-supplied
software/hardware and gallery-supplied hardware.  The cost on the gallery
side alone rose to 30K, and beyond that some high-end hardware had to be
begged and borrowed.  Most artists cannot afford to purchase all the
hardware for a single piece and have it travel intact.  They mix and match
according to various exhibition demands.  If the artist sells a piece to a
museum do they sell only the software?  If a museum buys an artist's
software, do they go out and immediately buy a power Mac (three or four
grand) or SGI Onyx (three hundred grand) to run it?  As you point out,
they'd better because that hardware may be unattainable a few years down
the road.  To complicate matters, some digital works involve sculptural
elements that hide electronic components, and these elements are
size-specific to the electronics involved.  Future substitutions of more
advanced hardware may not work.

Right now, video projectors in the three to four-thousand dollar range are
still fairly pixilated, and some artists capitalize on this quality.  Does
this mean that using future projectors with better resolution will
compromise the integrity of art conceived under present limitations?  Isn't
this now a problem with film that is transferred and projected as video in
order to preserve the original?

I think the lack of response to your post does indeed confirm that museums
are not yet collecting much digital art, and we may have to wait a while
for this discussion to ignite.

Best,
Stephen Nowlin


On 10/25 Paul Messier wrote:

>For an ongoing project administered by the Bay Area Video Coalition, I
>am gathering information as to whether fine art museums are collecting
>(not just exhibiting) digital art.  As an art conservator, I am also
>wondering what (if any) steps collecting institutions should take to
>preserve digital art.  To me the most serious threat to the
>preservation of digital art would be machine and file format
>obsolescence.  As new technologies quickly replace older ones, should
>museums consider adopting policies that require accessioned digital art
>be: preserved in its native state? -- re-formatted to meet some sort of
>software/hardware standard? -- or both?
>
>Paul Messier
>Conservator of Photographs & Works on Paper
>Boston Art Conservation
>77 Griggs Rd.
>Boston, MA 02146
>tel: 617.738.7072
>fax: 617.738.8841
>email: [log in to unmask]

Stephen Nowlin
Vice President
Director, Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery
Art Center College of Design
1700 Lida Street
Pasadena, California 91103  USA
(818)396-2397vox (818)405-9104fax
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